ipoditunespodcasts
iTunes displays the number of "plays" for each track. What exactly does this mean?
For example, playing a little bit of a track does not seem to increment the number. But playing most, but not all, of a track seems to.
Does playing n seconds trigger the increment? n percent of the track? Or something else?
I have a 4GB iPod Mini, if that matters.
The motivation is, I have iTunes set to automatically delete podcasts after they're played, and I don't want to accidentally trigger a deletion.
Did you have shuffle on while listening to music? If you did, the podcasts will also be shuffled.
The first thing to check is to see if iTunes has marked those specific songs to end early. Next, try re-encoding the song at a lower or different bitrate and syncing it to the device. Often a glitch in the file can cause iPods to skip to the next song, but the same binary file plays through on macs with better code for handling errors. Lastly, it could be error creeping into the filesystem structure on the iPod. Once you're sure you've backed up everything from the iPod, you can enter disk mode and use Disk Utility (on the mac - on Windows there are lots of disk formatting tools) to zero the drive. That will test the actual hard drive for errors and spare out any bad blocks.
Feel free to edit this or comment if you find none of these helps narrow down the cause.
Best Answer
In the behavior I have seen in the 5+ years of podcast listening. iTunes marks it as played based on a percentage listened. My guess is that would be about 98-99% listened. A 5 minute show would basically be the end. An hour and a half show would be just the last few seconds.